M. Soret came in, led in by Frau von Goethe, and remained about an hour.  He brought from the duke some gold medals, and by showing and talking about these seemed to entertain Goethe very pleasantly.

Frau von Goethe and M. Soret went to court, and I was left alone with Goethe.

Remembering his promise to show me again his Marienbad Elegy at a fitting opportunity, Goethe arose, put a light on the table, and gave me the poem.  I was delighted to have it once more before me.  He quietly seated himself again, and left me to an undisturbed perusal of the piece.

After I had been reading a while, I turned to say something to him, but he seemed to be asleep.  I therefore used the favorable moment, and read the poem again and again with a rare delight.  The most youthful glow of love, tempered by the moral elevation of the mind, seemed to me its pervading characteristic.  Then I thought that the feelings were more strongly expressed than we are accustomed to find in Goethe’s other poems, and imputed this to the influence of Byron—­which Goethe did not deny.

“You see the product of a highly impassioned mood,” said he.  “While I was in it I would not for the world have been without it, and now I would not for any consideration fall into it again.

“I wrote that poem immediately after leaving Marienbad, while the feeling of all I had experienced there was fresh.  At eight in the morning, when we stopped at the first stage, I wrote down the first strophe; and thus I went on composing in the carriage, and writing down at every stage what I had just composed in my head, so that by the evening the whole was on paper.  Thence it has a certain directness, and is, as I may say, poured out at once, which may be an advantage to it as a whole.”

“It is,” said I, “quite peculiar in its kind, and recalls no other poem of yours.”

“That,” said he, I “may be, because I staked upon the present moment as a man stakes a considerable sum upon a card, and sought to enhance its value as much as I could without exaggeration.”

These words struck me as very important, inasmuch as they threw a light on Goethe’s method so as to explain that many-sidedness which has excited so much admiration.

1824

Friday, January 2.—­Dined at Goethe’s, and enjoyed some cheerful conversation.  Mention was made of a young beauty belonging to the Weimar society, when one of the guests remarked that he was on the point of falling in love with her, although her understanding could not exactly be called brilliant.

“Pshaw,” said Goethe, laughing, “as if love had anything to do with the understanding.  The things that we love in a young lady are something very different from the understanding.  We love in her beauty, youthfulness, playfulness, trustingness, her character, her faults, her caprices, and God knows what ’je ne sais quoi’ besides; but we do not love her understanding.  We respect her understanding when it is brilliant, and by it the worth of a girl can be infinitely enhanced in our eyes.  Understanding may also serve to fix our affections when we already love; but the understanding is not that which is capable of firing our hearts, and awakening a passion.”